The holidays wouldn’t be the holidays unless they came with some kind of hassle attached. Take the holiday card, for instance. You have to send one to all your friends and all your “friends.” This requires a trip to the Post Office to ask your friendly postal employee for 200 of those cute winterberry stamps, to which they reply with a snarl, “We only have two books of winterberry so that’s only 32 stamps leaving you 168 stamps short of your goal.” “What else do you have?” I reply. “Well we have wreaths, a manger scene…” “But I’m Jewish,” Andy replies. “Okay, so you can go with our generic ‘Celebrate’ stamps or our ever-popular ‘Disney Villains’ series.” You get the point.

And once you get the stamps and the addresses, “Did the Freedmans move to West Palm for the winter or is that their new permanent address?” Now comes the picture. And the resultant chorus from the family members: “I look fat in that one,” “My hair’s a mess,” “Can we crop out his tattoos?”, (and what frequently happens to Andy) “Your eyes are closed,” as well as the ubiquitous, “Can you at least try to smile?” Fun times for all.

But we save our best fun for those holiday letters that accompany said holiday cards. You know the ones, they tell you how everyone in my family is doing great, in fact they’re doing much better that anyone in your family. So we attempt to have our characters try one, and then think better of it.

That’s all for this week. Happy Holidays and we will be back again to raise your holiday spirits with our constantly uplifting messages.

Andy and John